Monday, 14 November 2016

Subject and object

Ireland Baldwin: a self-confident
subject?

Recently I’ve been reading a book by US journalist Peggy
Orenstein. Girls & Sex, according
to the cover blurb, “paints a ground-breaking picture of today’s sexual
landscape – and reveals how girls and young women are navigating it”. It’s the
latest in a series of alarmist reports from the front line of human relations –
Pamela Paul’s Pornified and Ariel
Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs are
earlier examples – showing how we’re all going to hell in a handcart. If I had
a young daughter, I’d be troubled for what her future may hold. As it is, I respond
more to what the book tells me as a crossdreamer, someone who carries the feminine
within me and gains sexual, emotional and psychic satisfaction from cross-gender
ideas or behaviour.

The landscape Orenstein describes is certainly a frightening
one: a place where selfies morph into sexts, where teenage romance is reduced
to blow jobs and unwelcome anal penetration. The body becomes first a ‘project’,
then a ‘product’, to be endlessly transacted on social media, photographed, digitally
massaged, commented upon for good or ill. The cultural options available to her
interviewees are at once empowering and oppressive. She writes about the ideal
of ‘hotness’, which, as Levy had earlier observed, is something different from ‘attractiveness’
or ‘beauty’, a currency which infinitely replicates a commercialised, one-dimensional
vision of sexiness. If you’re Kim Kardashian, you can become a multi-millionaire
on the back of it. If you’re a bright college girl anxious to take advantage of
hard-won opportunities, it’s a minefield.

One interviewee, Camila, a college sophomore, talks
revealingly about dress. The previous day she’d worn a brand-new bustier top to
school:

“When I got dressed I was like ‘I feel super comfortable
with myself… I feel really hot and this is going to be a good day’. Then as
soon as I got to school I felt, like, automatically I wasn’t in control. People
are staring at you, looking you up and down, saying things. I started
second-guessing myself, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have worn this shirt. It’s too
revealing, it’s too tight.’ It’s dehumanising.”

Camila is on the horns of a dilemma. She has actively chosen to present a sexualised image, as
is her sovereign right. At the same time, she has no choice: the script is written for her by others; the girls are
in competition with each other for attention; and everyone is judging her, or
so she supposes. As Orenstein puts it, “Girls [like Camila] shifted between
subject and object day by day, moment by moment, sometimes without intending
to, sometimes unsure themselves of which they were”.

I’ve said before how unlocking my female self is like going
through a second adolescence, so it’s not surprising if Camila’s dilemma feels
like my dilemma. The self-determining subject empowers: this self looks out at
the world with steady gaze. But the habit of self-objectification, by culturally
ingrained custom, saps that power: this is a self who looks at herself being
looked at.

A strange misalliance develops between postfeminist sexual
self-confidence and the accelerating power of communications technology to
reduce a woman to an observable multi-part object. The British academic
Rosalind Gill has analysed this phenomenon, discerning a move among the sisterhood
from an “external male-judging gaze to a self-policing narcissistic gaze”. This
she sees as a more pernicious form of exploitation than any that had come
before, for “not only are women objectified as they were before, but through
sexual subjectification they must also now understand their own objectification
as pleasurable and self-chosen”.* As a crossdreamer I feel peculiarly
implicated in this development. The male in me is guilty of directing his ‘male-judging
gaze’ at any ‘hot’ woman who crosses his path, even one he only sees in the
mirror; at the same time, the female in me basks in the warm glow of being the
object of my self-directed desire.

I put on a dress. It’s short, because I believe my long legs
are my best feature and it makes me feel ‘hot’ to put them on show. I walk out
of the door, and start to “second-guess myself” (in Camila’s phrase). Perhaps it’s
too short? Perhaps I’m not in control after all? The high priests of crossdreaming theory are
keen to argue that the excitement a crossdreamer experiences at the thought of
having a female body is no different from the thrill a ciswoman feels when she
puts on a sexy dress. I dispute that: I am aroused by what Nature has not given me, not by what it has. But
where there is real symmetry is in this slippage between ‘subject’ and ‘object’.
Like the young women studied by Orenstein, I am swimming in a hypersexualised
medium where, rightly or wrongly, the body is queen; somehow I must keep my
head above water.

=====

*The quotations are from her chapter ‘Supersexualize me!
Advertising and the midriff’ in Mainstreaming
Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. Feona Attwood (2009).